The last words were almost inaudible. Then the silence and the moonlight closed in about them. The chapel was filled to overflowing, the next day, as the procession filed up the middle aisle. Led by the white-gowned ushers, they came slowly onward, faculty and trustees, alumnae and seniors, while above and around them, soft and full by turns, rose the sound of the organ under the masterly touch they knew so well. It was an hour when even the most heedless freshman felt the pain, the almost solemn sadness of the coming parting, yet the full meaning of the commencement day can be realized only by those who are leaving their Alma Mater for the last time. All too soon, the morning sped away and the president rose to confer the degrees, while a hush, slight, but expectant, crept over the place. "_Quae primum gradum accedunt._" At the well-known words, the seniors rose, with Theodora standing at their head. The girl was very pale, and her eyes looked dark and liquid, as she raised them to the president's face. From his seat in the south transept, Billy watched her while she stood there, tall and straight and noble in her young womanhood, a very daughter of to-day; and, as he looked, within him there strengthened the belief which had been slowly forming and guiding his life ever since the day, more than six years before, when Theodora had come down to him from the old apple-tree. In all those tedious, aching years, Theodora had been his best friend; and now with health and with her before him, he could afford to work, and wait, and hope. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Two years had passed away, and The Savins lay basking in the heat of an August noon. Here and there, a broad calladium leaf swayed majestically to and fro in a passing breeze, and the locusts sang shrilly in the trees overhead. Upstairs in her own room, Theodora rocked lazily, humming to herself while she darned her stockings. "Prosaic work!" she said aloud, half whimsically. "The sure forerunner of a prosaic spinsterhood! My plans don't seem to materialize rapidly, and I foresee that I shall go on darning stockings till the end of my days. Bah! how I hate it!" She rolled up her stockings into a ball. "Two years ago, and I was saying good-by to Billy in New York, and we were making great plans for what we were to accomplish. Dear old Billy! I hope he's quite strong by this time. It's almost time for another letter from him, seems to me." She tossed the ball to the table beside her, and, clasping her hands above her rumpled hair, fell to dreaming. Phebe interrupted her. "A letter for you, Teddy!" she proclaimed, opening the door and casting the envelope across the room towards her sister. "From Billy?" "How should I know? I don't read your letters." It was the same Phebe, older and taller, but otherwise unchanged. Now her tone was slightly toploftical.